This blog is about The Big Picture - information and insights about what goes on in the world outside our borders - and what it means for Americans. Unless otherwise specified, all photos from Deena Stryker archive.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Health Care: A Matter of Ideology

(This blog should have appeared a few days ago. For some reason after I uploaded it, it got lost. Sorry.)

Something is happening to the American political ethos when members start shouting in the hallowed chambers of Congress.

I can remember of visit to the U.S. in 1991 when Congress was debating whether to go to war against Iraq after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. I was living in France at the time, used to seeing the French parliament in all its disorderly conduct. The polite yet passionate debate over the war struck me as the epitome of civilized behavior, something the French still had to learn.

Well, all that was very relative, as I have since realiz-ed. The reason why the French (and other) parliaments get into heated arguments is because their members have profound ideological differences. The reason why the American Congress has remained staid and dignified is that its members espouse essentially the same ideology. That ideology goes under the label of non-ideology, but there is no such thing: the liberal ideology is that of free-market capitalism. It has a pedigree just like communism, socialism, or fascism.

By claiming to be non-ideological, our political class implies that ideologies are bad, whatever they are, hence keeping all competing ideologies at bay.

Now something has shifted in the seemingly immutable tectonic plates of our political world: the effort to bring American health care within striking distance of the rest of the developed world - and even some underdeveloped countries - has shattered the carefully constructed myth that politics can be non-ideological. The proof: a Republican member of Congress called the President a liar during his State of the Union Speech, and yesterday, during the final debate on health care, a member of the opposition shouted that Bart Stupak was a “baby killer”.

The President has mentioned several times of late that there are “profound ideological differences” between the Democrats and the Republicans, all the while claiming that he is not an ideologue.

That insurmountable contradiction is due to the President’s conviction has that people can be “nudged” into doing what is right: behavioral politics. The furies unleashed by the right - of which we are seeing only the tip of the iceberg - are proof that the chasm is too wide between those with progressive ideas and those opposed to such ideas for this country to be reformed by nudging.

In politics there has always been and will always be a left and a right, regardless of how these ends of the spectrum are designated with respect to any existing government. (In the Soviet Union under a communist regime, the “left” was the liberal-oriented opposition; in Iran today, the same is true of those who oppose the right-wing mullahs.) Left is generally understood to mean more free-dom from the power apparatus, and in the twenty-first century it also means more solidarity, a recognition that individuals, while valuing freedom, require the support of the larger community to fully benefit from their individual freedom.

In a world of six going on seven billion inhabitants, solidarity can no longer be carried out on a neighborly basis: it has become one of the tasks of government. Those who are determined to deprive America’s less advantaged of health care fail to accept this reality. Their opposition is so visceral that it has broken through the barrier of respectability built up over the decades since Americans had a Progressive Party to counter the power of big business.

If the President learns only one thing from this battle - which is not yet over - it is that he should have taken the bull by the horns and drafted a “government takeover” of the health system, meaning simply that care would not be subject to profit. The battle would hardly have been more virulent than the one he has been through, for what is at best a first step. Because now the myth that we have a non-ideological system has been exposed.

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Born in Philadelphia, I studied in Paris, became a French citizen by marriage, debuted at Agence France Presse in Rome, then, as Deena Boyer, followed Fellini’s creative process for The Two Hundred Days of ’81/2’. The proceeds from this book enabled me travel to Cuba to to interview Fidel Castro for a major French weekly, meeting with him again a week after the Kennedy assassination and several times in 1964 for a book, Cuba 1964: When the Revolution was Young, in which the other members of the government (including Che Guevara, Raul Castro and Celia Sanchez), tell in their own words why they made the revolution. My Cuba archive is on-line at Duke University.

In the seventies, I did graduate work in Global Survival, taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and was a speech writer in the Carter State Department, publishing an article on U.S.-Soviet relations in the in-house journal in 1976.

Returning to Paris in 1981, with assistance from the Centre National du Livre, I published Une autre Europe, un autre Monde, the only book that foresaw the reunification of Europe and the breakup of the Soviet Union. I returned to Philadel-phia in 2000, and have been a contributor and senior editor at various on-line journals.

A Taoist Politics: The Case for Sacredness hopes to change the way both seekers and skeptics look at good and evil - -and at the daunting problems of the 21st century. It shows that religious belief is not necessary to achieve serenity, but that awareness of the sacred as confirmed by modern science, is. It does this by viewing the world as a system and exploring what that means for the role of politics.

America Revealed to a Honey-Colored World is a primer for Americans and others who find the policies of successive US governments difficult to square with their image of the country and its founding documents. The decades I spent living on both sides of the Iron Curtain provided me with a unique awareness of America’s image abroad and of the mainstream media’s failure to convey news and ideas to the voters in whose name policies are carried out. References to work by other political writers illustrate little-known or forgotten features of American history that have contributed to the tragic face the country presents today.

Cuba 1964 provides the definitive answer to the question: “Was Fidel Castro a Communist before he carried out the revolution, or did he become one because of the way the United States reacted when he ousted pro-US dictator Fulgencio Batista? While following day by day events, I had extensive conversations with the men and women who had joined the Castro brothers as early as 1953 and were now members of the revolutionary government. Together with Fidel, Raul, Che and Celia Sanchez, they told me in their own words why and now they made the Revolution hat continues to inspire countries in Latin America and around the world. The text is illustrated with photographs from my black and white archive which can be seen on-line at Duke University.

Lunch with Fellini Dinner with Fidel: How did it happen that a fourteen year old American girl found herself living among the French in post-war Paris? The answer to that question also explains why I went on to live in half a dozen countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain, becoming mutti-lingual, writing first about the cinema, then about ‘the big picture’ while raising two children, mostly on my own. A religious grandmother and a hedonistic lover accompanied me on a journal which has been both spiritual and political, and is illustrated by many photographs from my personal album.